Social Control, Social Learning, and Cheating. Evidence from Lab and Online Experiments on Dishonesty

• In Event: 259 - Section on Rationality and Society Paper Session. Rationality and Social Structure

Abstract

Whereas behavioral game theory has extensively studied the effects of anonymity, consequences of social control have been widely neglected in laboratory research on cheating. Varying the conditions of the decision-making environment we offered participants the opportunity to increase their payoff by undetectable lies. In addition to a baseline treatment, in which subjects rolled a die in private and showed a high extent of dishonest behavior, we increased the degree of social control by a novel treatment in which subjects played in randomly assigned pairs of two. The presence of others proved to substantially, but only temporarily reduce dishonest behavior. Furthermore, one treatment group received feedback on unethical behavior of participants in a similar experiment. Knowing that others betrayed in the experiment facilitated social learning and led to a higher prevalence of cheating, but not to a significant deterioration of honesty norms. Finally, increasing the degree of anonymity by conducting the experiment online instead of in the lab increased the extent of norm transgressions slightly. We conclude from these results that most people do not unconditionally abide to social norms, but base their decisions on the behaviour of others and on characteristics of the situation at hand.

Authors

• Martina Kroher, Leibniz University Hanover

• Tobias Wolbring, University of Mannheim